PROLOGUE
MARISA gave a soft gasp as the man opposite her opened the slim case he’d just taken out of his jacket pocket.
‘For you,’ the man said. There was a fond look in his eyes as he slid the case towards her. ‘I want you to have it.’
Marisa gazed at him, open pleasure in her expression.
She ran a finger lightly over the stones, which sparkled in the light from the candle on the table. ‘It’s beautiful!’ she breathed. Then a more troubled expression showed in her eyes. ‘But are you sure …?’
The man gave a decisive nod of his head. ‘Yes, quite sure.’
Marisa picked up the case, reluctantly shutting the lid, gazing across at the man who had given her such a wonderful token of what she meant to him. She dropped the jewellery case into her handbag—the beautiful, soft leather handbag with a designer logo that was yet another such token. Then she lifted her eyes to the man again. She had eyes only for him! Certainly not for the middle-aged man dining alone, a few tables away, engrossed in texting on his mobile phone, his face in shadow.
Now Ian was in her life Marisa had neither eyes nor thoughts for anyone else. From their first meeting to this precious moment he had transformed her life beyond all recognition, and the wonder of it still amazed her. She had had no idea—none at all—when she’d come to London those short months ago how totally her life would change. Oh, she’d had hopes, it was true, and ambitions and purpose—but that they had actually come about was still wonderful to her. And it was all embodied in the startlingly handsome man sitting opposite her, gazing at her with such devotion.
She bit her lip slightly. If only she didn’t have to hide in the corners of Ian’s life, be hidden away from a censorious world like a shameful secret. Yet that, she knew, was what she would be seen as. Someone who had to be hidden away, never acknowledged in public, to the world. That was why they could only meet like this, in places Ian did not usually frequent, where he was not known or recognised, where he could be sure he would not bump into someone who would question her dining with him—someone who knew both him and Eva.
Eva …
The name echoed in Marisa’s head, haunting her like a ghost that could not be exorcised. Emotion darted in her eyes. Oh, she thought in anguish, if only Eva were not who she was. The emotion deepened, and she gazed helplessly across the table at the handsome, smiling face opposite. If only Eva were not the woman who was Ian’s wife …
CHAPTER ONE
ATHAN Teodarkis’s eyes moved over the photographs spread out on his desk. His sculpted mouth tightened to a tight line like a whip, and anger speared him.
So it had started! Just what he’d feared right from the beginning. From the moment his sister Eva had told him who she was in love with …
He felt the anger stab at him again, and with deliberate control made himself release the tension steeling his shoulders, his spine. He contoured his back against the leather moulding of the executive chair he was sitting in behind the mahogany desk in his office. Across the wide expanse of expensive carpet the vista of the City, over which the lavish London HQ of Teodarkis International had a panoramic view, went unattended.
His hard gaze went on studying the photos. Though taken by a camera phone, and from half a dozen metres’ distance, their evidence was indisputable. They showed Ian Randall, his boyishly handsome face gazing devotedly, eagerly, at the woman opposite him.
With part of his mind Athan could see why.
She was blonde, like Ian, fair-skinned and heart-stoppingly lovely. Her pale hair fell like a waterfall either side of her face. Perfect features—full parted lips, delicate nose and luminous blue eyes—all made her a total peach of a female. No wonder she’d captivated the fool sitting opposite her.
It had been entirely predictable. Right from the start Athan had feared that Ian Randall was weak, self-indulgent, and born to be a philanderer.
Just like his father.
Martin Randall had been notorious—notorious for womanising, notorious for succumbing to every tempting female who passed in front of him. He had indulged his incontinent desire for her until the next one floated by. Then he’d dropped the present incumbent and gone after a new one.
Time and time again.
Disgust and contempt twisted Athan’s mouth. If that was what Martin’s son was going to be like, then—
Then I damn well should have stopped Eva marrying him! Whatever it took, I should have stopped it!
But he hadn’t—he had given the son the benefit of the doubt, even though it had gone against all his instincts to do so. His mouth set. And now he’d been proved right all along. Ian was no better than his father.
Philanderer. Womaniser. Libertine.
Adulterer.
With an angry impulse Athan got to his feet, picking up the innocuous-looking buff folder that contained enough dynamite to blow apart Ian’s marriage. Could it yet be saved?
Athan speculated. How far had his adultery progressed? Certainly his inamorata had been installed in a fancy apartment by Ian, and judging by her designer outfit and freshly styled hair—not to mention the diamond necklace she’d been presented with—she was clearly benefiting from his largesse already. His mouth thinned. But had she paid the bill for that largesse yet?
The expression on Ian’s face caught by the camera phone was—no other word for it—besotted. It wasn’t the expression of a lascivious lecher—it was the expression of a man caught in the toils of a woman he could not bring himself to resist. A woman he was showering his wealth upon. But not, as yet, very much of his time. That was the one cause for optimism Athan could see in this whole sordid business.
Th
e surveillance reports had found no evidence that Ian Randall visited the girl in her fancy apartment—not yet, at any rate—and nor did he take her to hotels. So far the only time he spent with her was in restaurants, clearly chosen for their out-of-the-way locations, and his only visible adultery was his besotted expression.
Can I stop this in its tracks? Can I stop it in time?
That was the question in the forefront of Athan’s brain. Ian Randall was, it seemed, playing it pretty cautiously—in that, at least, he was unlike his father, who had been totally blatant about his affairs. But if that look of slavish devotion on his face was anything to go by he would soon throw caution to the winds and make the girl his mistress in fact as well as intention.
It was inevitable.
He set the folder back on the desk with a sense of angry frustration.
What the hell am I going to do about this?
The question hung in his head like a dead weight. He had to do something—that was inescapable. He had a responsibility to do so. If he had done from the outset what he’d wanted to do—put his foot down and objected to Eva’s marriage to Ian Randall—then he wouldn’t be facing this infernal situation now. He should have gone with his instincts, stopped the marriage. Whatever it had taken to do so. Oh, Eva would have been heartbroken, he knew, but what was she going to be once she found out what Ian had done?
Athan’s expression shadowed. He knew exactly what she was going to be—going to become—if her husband followed the same damnable path his father had so heedlessly and selfishly taken. She would end up just like Ian’s unhappy, tormented mother.
Athan had grown up knowing all about just how unhappy Sheila Randall was in her marriage to Martin Randall, Ian’s father. Sheila had been his mother’s best friend since finishing school in Switzerland, and once Sheila’s eyes had been painfully opened to her husband’s ways she had poured out her unhappiness into his mother’s ears.
‘Poor Sheila’ had become a permanent fixture in their lives during his youth, as his mother did her best to comfort and console her friend—whether by phone or on mutually exchanged visits between London and Athens. Athan’s mother had spent, so it seemed to him, an interminable amount of time trying to mop up Sheila Randall’s tears, but despite his own sense that the best course of action would have been to divorce Martin Randall and be done with him, Sheila, it seemed, was of a romantic disposition.